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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1205

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

The acquisition of attitudes by Flemish adolescents: a quantitative investigation

Authors: De Vogelaer, Gunther
Submitted by: De Vogelaer, Gunther (Universität Münster, Germany)

It is commonly observed in situations of dialect loss that parents are reluctant to transmit dialects to children. In some areas where such reluctance is found, the dialect is acquired as a second variety. This process appears to start as children form peer groups (for instance in kindergarten or primary school), and may continue until or even beyond adolescence. For instance, Rys (2007) investigates children in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, and shows that dialect proficiency in her population increases (at least) until the age of 16. This may, in principle, be due to different reasons, including a heavier exposure to the dialect (for instance because parents stop using supraregional varieties vis-á-vis older children), contact with more non-local varieties, stronger peer group influence on language usage, or developing abilities on the socio-cognitive level (see, e.g., Kerswill & Williams 2000 and Chambers 2003 for discussion).

In my paper, I aim at clarifying the role of language attitudes in this increasing dialect proficiency, using results drawn from a matched-guise hearing experiment among Flemish adolescents of 10-16 years old. It is investigated to what extent these adolescents are able to detect different varieties of Dutch and to localize them, and whether they associate these varieties with similar characteristics as adults do. All of the investigated abilities appear to be present to some extent in the youngest informants in the sample, but they develop strongly during adolescence. This suggests that, while previous research has rightly emphasized children's ability to express their identoty through language (e.g. Kerswill & Williams 2000, Berthele 2002), socio-cognitive abilities to detect and interpret variation still improve at a fairly advanced age. In addition, the results suggest that patterns of variation are not simply copied during acquisition, but that children and adolescents need to fully grasp the social meaning of a linguistic variable before they will start using it in an adult-like fashion.